Ebook: Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space

Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France—the Edison Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès's Star Films, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères—as well as the first producers in Southern California, Studios Before the System describes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world's Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the "specific art of the machine." Studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape.

The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture, Studios Before the System expands the social and cultural footprint of cinema’s virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments